1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally concerns recorder/players, or player/recorders, of visual and audio information, especially as may be (i) combined and (ii) portable.
The present invention particularly concerns conservation of power in combination recorder/players wherein significant power is consumed in a rotating disk memory store.
2. Description of the Prior Art
2.1 Encoding/Recording MP3 Files On, and Playing MP3 Files From, a Hard Disk Drive (HDD)
Portable CD-ROM players having been around several years, portable players of MP3 files have recently (circa 2001) become popular. Some portable player-recorders are capable of dealing with both CD-ROM and MP3 media, as the player-recorder of the present invention will prove to be capable of. However, in order to encode MP3 from CD-ROM in real time, a processor/microprocessor of considerable capability has heretofore been required, making that this process has normally been performed in computers, and limiting the application of the necessary processing power to portable units, especially as may be powered by batteries.
The combination portable CD-ROM and MP3 player-recorder of the present invention will be seen not only to use a new low-power MP3 encoder/decoder chip that permits the encoding of MP3 words at rates equal to and greater than normal play speeds, but to use this chip flexibly, and to new ends of creating MP3 digital words that are not of the same bit-width, and sound quality, as are the digital words of a compressed ISO standard CD-ROM which these MP words serve to supplant.
Additionally in the prior art, some units, not normally portable and often associated with computers as drives, are capable of duplicating MP3 format media at greater than normal playback speeds. However, due to requirements for extensive computer resource for the reading and writing of necessary files, this level of function has not heretofore been deemed realistically realizable with a portable, battery-powered, MP3 player-recorder.
2.2 Conservation of Power in CD-ROM and MP3 Player-recorders, Including in Combination CD-ROM and MP3 Player-recorders
It has been recognized that power may be conserved in CD-ROM and MP3 player-recorders, and in combination CD-ROM and MP3 player-recorders, by the simple expedient of turning off functional sections of the device, especially rotating devices such as CD-ROM and hard disk drives, when not in use.
However, little attention has been given to designing a combination CD-ROM and MP3 player-recorder form “the ground up” so as to minimize the uses, and the durations of uses, or high-powered sections at the possible costs of new sections, and/or the longer and/or new uses of lower-powered sections. The present invention will be seen to employ (i) a semiconductor memory in combination with both of (ii) a CD/ROM player, and also a (iii) hard disk drive for both recording and playing, to the particular purpose of minimizing the time that both the (ii) CD/ROM player, and the (iii) HDD are operative, consuming power, during normal player-recorder functions.
2.3 Retrospective Initiation of Recording in, and Computer-less High-speed Transfer Between, MP3 Player-recorders
The concept that something that is being played, such as a tract on a CD-ROM, could selectively, retrospectively, be chosen to be saved, or not to be saved, mandates that there is something to save resulting from the playing, to wit: a file. The creation, and the storage, of MP3 encoded files has in the past most normally required, respectively, (i) the action of a processor or microprocessor running an operating system having instructions or microcode most normally resident on, and read from, a HDD, along with (ii) the lodging of files on a HDD. The running of both a processor/microprocessor and a HDD has deemed to be so energy intensive in a portable, battery-powered device, that no accommodation has been given to “retrospectively throwing away” a just-made MP3 file. At best the user/listener can go and delete, usually from a HDD, the file just made.
The present invention will show how to make an MP3 file in a portable, battery powered, with such energy economy that it is not detrimental to listen to a CD-ROM, selectively retrospectively keeping certain MP3 files newly encoded from selected tracks of the CD-ROM while completely discarding other newly encoded MP3 files as represent other, unwanted, tracks.
2.4 High-speed RIP of a CD/ROM
Taking the digital contents of an audio (as opposed to a data) CD/ROM into one or more MP3 format files stored upon a computer has been a task requiring considerable computer “horsepower”, and has thus been but seldom performed by computers, and, with the seemingly considerable required energy, never (to the best knowledge of the inventors) by portable, battery-powered, combination CD/ROM and MP3 player-recorders. The present invention will be seen to overcome the previous limitations, including in areas of processing and storage and power, in this process by (i) managing the rotating times of disk drives carefully, (ii) buffering CD/ROM data until suitably encoded as MP3, and (iii) again buffering the MP3 data until suitably recorded on a HDD. Everything goes along reasonably speedily at about 4×-6× normal read speed because, inter alia, there is no processor/microprocessor and no operating system and no instructions involved—as is conventional. Instead, the entire MP3 encoding will be seen to be done in a single chip, and the management of all data transfer in another, file manager, chip.
2.5 Computer-less High-speed Transfer Between MP3 Player-recorders
High speed transfer of files, such as MP3 files, requires some measure of correlation in speed of transmit and receive, and some buffering. Heretofore MP3 Player-recorders have been routinely connected to computers for bi-directional transfer of MP3 files in accordance with the greater speed, and buffer capacity, of the computer, but it has not been realized to transfer MP3 files between portable player-recorders themselves, without benefit of any computer.